Let’s Build a Min Heap
A heap data structure in computer science is a special tree that satisfies the heap property, this just means that the parent is less than or equal to the child node for a minimum heap A.K.A min heap, and the parent is greater than or equal to the child node for a maximum heap A.K.A max heap. In this article I will talk specifically about binary heaps, so each node in our tree will have at most two children. Yes there are more than just binary heaps. The binary heap was created by J.W. J. Williams in 1964 for heapsort.
A binary heap is a binary tree with two other constraints [1]
1) Shape Property: A binary heap is a complete binary tree, this means all of the levels of the tree are completely filled except possibly the last level. The nodes are filled from left to right.
2) Heap Property: The value stored in each node is either (greater than or equal to) OR (less than or equal to ) it’s children depending if it is a max heap or a min heap.
